Camp David: the Autobiography by David Walliams: review

Tom Payne finds David Walliams's desperation to be liked rather dull.

There are few personalities so large that their lives cannot be fitted within the hard covers of a ready-for-Christmas memoir, complete with a publicity shot and raised gold lettering on the dust-jacket.

Alan Partridge and Michael Jackson have taken the genre close to fantasy; Jade Goody was a gift who gave for as long as she could. Otherwise, we’re left with entertainers who recount their awkwardness and uncertainty for as long as it takes to bring them to whatever it was that made them cherished enough for you to buy your nephew the book. Then the narrative mysteriously stops.

David Walliams’s memoir ends with the words, “To be continued…” So we can imagine an editor saying, “No, David, don’t mention Lara Stone – not yet – and enough about the swimming already. Save something for 2014!” The torso with which he leaves us exposes his destructive depression, some encounters and flings with those who were then higher up the celebrity lists than he, and the genesis of the show that made him: Little Britain.

The confection, sad to say, can be fairly dull. After all, Little Britain is a gross-out Fast Show, which in turn was a series of amusing but overworked performances. It’s at best diverting to read that Walliams met a young man who proclaimed in a Welsh accent that he was the only homosexual in the National Youth Theatre. (If you can’t see where that is going, you won’t be buying the book.)

And some readers might share the fascination with those famous types he first stalks and later befriends. He does helpfully answer the question that even intelligent people, such as Mark Lawson and David Baddiel, insist on asking him repeatedly: come on, David, are you gay? If there were any doubt in our hero’s own mind, Graham Norton tells him the answer. It turns out that the sometime beau of Patsy Kensit was straight all along.

One wants to like Walliams, who in interviews can come across as a pensive undergraduate whose cheekiness has given him a place among a more attractive sort of celebrity. And, as one would expect of a comedian who confesses to moments of suicidal self-loathing, he wants to be loved. This helps to explain the formulaic use of the words “legendary”, “lovely” or, of the director Rupert Goold, “pointlessly handsome”.

But, in those moments of candour that the memoir requires, he is frank about the difficulty of working with Matt Lucas, who is not a morning person, offers fewer ideas and has a phobia of public transport. He is quick to tell us when projects he doesn’t like “bombed”, and to list sketch shows that haven’t quite had the legs of Little Britain.

Perhaps this need to seem vulnerable – to give readers their £20 worth – is why he includes extracts from his diaries in the memoir. On one sorry occasion an unnamed but adored girlfriend read them. They revealed his sex addiction. He writes, “The night with the BA air hostess was the first of numerous meaningless encounters.” But leaf back to the night with the BA air hostess, and there’s an air of “Phwoar” about it. He asserts to Russell Brand that the BA hostesses can be fitter than those on Virgin flights.

It would be good to think that these clashes exist by design, as if to reveal the many contradictions that make Walliams such a beguiling, complex character. And it would be unfair to single out the later line, “She gradually removed her hands to reveal the most beautiful breasts I had ever seen,” as an example of gloating, because in context it shows a development of sorts. But the sense of, “Reader, I had her” can become tiresome, such as this aperçu from the Top of the Pops set: “Kensit didn’t know it then, but the big ungainly teenager in the red stripy shirt peering out at her from behind the set as she sang would one day share her bed.” Get in.

This stuff makes the wistful bits seem mawkish, while the sentimentality renders the braggadocio all the more gauche. The two Walliamses don’t coexist as easily on paper as they might in his head. For example, I don’t quite believe him when he writes that he is “amusing and dark at the same time”; as an actor and a writer, he tends to be one or the other alternately.

This lover of Larkin could well reread “I Remember, I Remember”, in which the poet mocks the kind of formulaic childhood he never had. There could have been room for a sensitive examination of small towns, growing pains, patience and work, if only the stardom hadn’t come in the way.